Hello and welcome to episode 41 of the PhD Life Coach. If you are listening to this on the Monday that it comes out, it is my wedding day! I am one week out from that. I'm recording this a week in advance. Those of you watching on YouTube can see all the various bits of stationery fun and wet weather white umbrellas and all sorts of stuff that I'm surrounded by but I wanted to record one last podcast for the 2022/23 academic year.

I can't quite believe the wedding has come round. It felt like it was ages and ages in advance, and all of a sudden it's next week and it's all really exciting. I've also mentioned in previous episodes that I've decided that I'm taking some time off over the summer. We have our wedding and then later our honeymoon and family holidays and things like that and I've decided that one of the joys of working for yourself is that I'm going to be a good boss to myself and give myself time to rest, recuperate, and spend time with my soon-to-be husband who's a teacher and gets the summers off. 

So this will be the last podcast of this season. I will start back up again at the beginning of September and today’s episode, in honour of all of that is going to reflect on the seven things that I have learned since starting this podcast back in October, 2022. 

At that stage, I had newly quit my job as a Professor at the University of Birmingham, was at the really, really baby stages of starting my business, and I decided that a podcast would be a really useful way to share my thoughts with people, give me a focus to build some resources for free that anyone in the world can use, and that might, get me some clients, who knows. 

And so I decided it would go out. I decided it would go out weekly. And I was really nervous about that because I'm somebody who has always told myself that I struggle to be consistent. And I was worried that it'd be one of those things where I started, did a few weeks, and then ran out of enthusiasm and got distracted by something else.

And here we are. Episode 41. There has been an episode every single week, and that is the first lesson that I've learned is that even when you're somebody who feels like they've never stuck to anything and struggle to do things regularly… I've always got stuff done, but I've struggled to do that kind of regular show up, week in, week out, do something over and over again, and…you can do it. 

And it made me really reflect on why was it, why is this the thing that I've stuck to? Because there's other things I haven't stuck to. Those of you who are on my newsletter mailing list know that that is intermittent at best. You still get my monthly free coaching every month. I've done that consistently, but the actual newsletter, not so consistent.

The plan to write a book in live action, send you guys chapters as I went along. Yeah, I'm going to return to that, but it's kind of stalled. But the podcast I have stuck to and I've been consistent and I think the thing that's made a difference is a constellation of different qualities. 

So it is public so people know, I've got that kind of accountability. People know that it comes out on a Monday and I look at my stats, you know. I I get little graphs from my podcast provider and the most downloads are on the day it comes out, so I know it's important to be regular and stick it out. So I've got that accountability and there's a reason why it's important that it comes out that day.

It's also meaningful to me. I can clearly see why this is of use for people, where it fits into my business, how it helps people to get to know me and get to know what I do and make people more likely to want my coaching and to want my workshops. It's also meaningful to me because, there's a lot of crap that goes on in the coaching industry, and there's a lot of people that are selling extremely high-end products, often to people who can't afford them and one of the things that I really wanted to make sure I did was provide value for people who are giving me no money. 

There are PhD students all around the world who are poorly paid or not paid at all for what they do. They're incredibly able, highly qualified people, and they don't necessarily have money to spend on coaching. And so I wanted there to be some high quality outputs that would help people that will never give me money for coaching. And so producing this podcast had real meaning for me. 

I'm also increasingly finding it's got value for you guys. I love it when I get messages from people listening saying that they found things useful or just random people on Twitter saying, “you know, oh, you really should listen to the PhD Life Coach podcast. It's been so helpful” and promoting it to others. 

So many of my clients, the people that hire me individually to support them with coaching packages do so because they've listened to this podcast and they say, you get it. I can tell that you get it. And so I think that combination of kind of public accountability, personal meaning, and recognized value for others has meant that I've stuck to this. And I think that's really useful for us all to reflect on, when in future there are other things that we want to stick to. How can we create more of those things so that we're more likely to stay doing what we're doing?

The second thing I've learned is that I was right. Let me explain what I mean by that. Some people told me that when I was planning a podcast, I needed to either make it for PhD students or make it for academics, that I shouldn't try and make it for both audiences because there's that whole thing that if you make it for everyone, then you make it for no one. 

And I've always been very clear that it's for people in academia, it's for people who have either an academic background or who are currently working in universities. But I was absolutely adamant that I was absolutely adamant that PhD students all the way through to senior professors, needed the same stuff.

And I have been proved absolutely right. I have PhD students messaging me saying, I, you know, this is exactly what I need to hear. They're sending episodes to their friends. And then I have senior professors contacting me for coaching, saying, “I've never heard people describe it like this before. I thought it was just me.”

PhD students through to senior professors have almost the same issues. And as I've said in some episodes that could sound really depressing, but in actual fact it just shows that you don't need to get to being a senior professor in order to be happy. Cause a lot of them aren't happy either. A lot of them don't feel valued, they don't feel able, they still feel like imposters because they're still their 21 year old selves inside their brains, even if their bodies are starting to get older like mine. 

That just means that we can grab control of wherever we are and support ourselves and remind ourselves how brilliant we were doing and support ourselves gently to improve. So not just accepting exactly where we are and not trying to make any progress, but not trying to beat ourselves up to get there.

And this realization is incredibly important in supervisory relationships. The PhD students I coach often believe that their supervisors absolutely have it together. And so if they haven't replied to emails, it's because they don't like you. Or if they've given harsh feedback, it's because your writing is rubbish and they don't recognize that the reasons could be they're drowning in emails and they spent about 10 minutes on your article and just banged out the important stuff because they're exhausted and have far too much to do. 

On the flip side, supervisors believe some of their PhD students aren't pulling their weight or just don't understand that they need to be independent, but they don't get it that their PhD students are having exactly the same concerns that they are.

The more we recognize that we're all in this weird world of academia together and that we all have a lot of the same thoughts and emotions, the easier it is to support ourselves and the easier it is to support other people. 

And that's why next year I'm going to be developing some more supervisor focused courses and some senior management focused coaching for people that have line management responsibilities over others. So Heads of School, Heads of College, that sort of level. So if you are interested in that, do drop me a message. 

And that really leads on to my third lesson, which is that just because you have power over something, it doesn't mean it's your fault. We talk a lot about personal responsibility in mindset coaching because we look at how it's our thoughts that create our feelings and therefore our actions and results. And a lot of people interpret that as meaning that it's our fault that things feel difficult. If we are burnt out, it's our fault. If we are stressed, it's our fault. And those are just not the same thing. 

I knew this coming into doing the podcast from all my coach training and from my time in academia, but the more I've done it, the more important it is become to me to separate the structural from the personal. That this isn't just about developing yourself to be more resilient and to be able to thrive in challenging environments.

This is about challenging some of the structures themselves. Being able to use mindset coaching to decide when you are just not going to do something or when you are not going to make it mean anything about you and your abilities. That if there's too much to do, there probably is, and that's okay. That's not a failing of you. That's not something that you should exhaust yourself over.

We can start to challenge these structures and we can start to not make it worse for ourselves. And so there's going to be a lot more of that stuff. Thinking about structural influences over things like imposter syndrome and why they impact certain sectors of society more than others. More about structural inequalities and those sorts of things, in my podcasts next year.

The fourth one, and this is really important for me to learn and I think it will be important for a lot of you too, is that something doesn't have to be perfect to have value. I am thankfully somebody who quite likes talking and who doesn't worry too much about my ability to chat, but I do worry about whether things are good enough and whether they're useful.

But I rapidly realized that I could spend way too much time making this podcast. You know, it's important. It's a key part of my strategy. It has intrinsic value in itself, but I don't want to spend two days a week on my podcast. I have too many people to coach and too much other stuff to do, and so I decided from the beginning that good enough was going to have to be good enough.

I come up with my title, I plan out some bullet points like that and then I talk, and if I mess it up, I stop and I pause for a minute and then I say it again. And then after I've recorded it, I do it. I edit it using Descript, which I highly recommend if any of you make podcasts and that's what gets posted. 

I've had a lovely friend of mine try to be really helpful and offer to help me improve the sound quality and things, and that is something I'll do in the future. I'm sure I have a pretty good mic, but I record through Zoom, so it's not perfect, I know that. But I decided the key thing was that I produced a podcast every week and that it's audible enough and it's clear enough and it's high enough quality to be useful for people. And that's good enough. 

Is it perfect? No. Do I want to improve things in the future? Yes. Will I continue keeping it slightly ad hoc? Slightly chatty, just me - not making it up as I go along as such, but talking off the cuff. Yeah. Because I also think that sometimes not perfect is nicer to listen to. I can't cope with those podcasts where it's read out from a script because my brain switches off. It's just, I get bored. 

And I think for all of you, you know, I do workshops on how to write when you're struggling, and one of the biggest things that hold people back is the belief that it's not worth doing if you don't do it perfectly. And this podcast experience has really emphasized to me how much that's not true. Good enough is really good enough, as long as it means it's out there.

The fifth lesson I've learned is the importance of being excited about where you are. So when I started this podcast, I got excited by literally every download. So I use Buzzsprout to host my podcast, and you can see your statistics and you can see them pop up, and every time one got downloaded, I was super excited.

And then the first time I had a hundred downloads in a month, I was like, this is amazing. I'm so excited. Now I get more than 300 downloads a week. I'm consistently in sort of 1600 ish downloads a month. And I'm excited about that too. But I have to remind myself when I'm like, Ooh, maybe I could be more than that.

Maybe I could hit 5,000 a month, da da da. But I used to be excited by a hundred download weeks. And it's the same with money. It's very easy to start looking at your income and start going, well, okay, I've got this much, but I'd love have that much. I've hit some of my goals for this year. I haven't met all of my goals for this year, but when I remember how excited I was to get my first clients and to get that first bit of money into the business account and things, I have to remind myself to be super excited about where I am now. 

And I am, and I see this at every stage of the academic career, PhD students within a month of starting who are terrified of writing up when two months ago you were partying because you got offered a PhD position. This was your dream. Same with members of staff, same with people who've just been promoted. Where we are now is usually past us’s dream in some way, and we have to be excited by that because if we are constantly striving that we won't be happy till we get to the next bit, it's no fun along the way. 

So that is a real resolution for me next year, is that as my business grows and it is, that I really appreciate every step along the way rather than waiting till I hit my next big goals. 

Lesson six is, it's really hard to listen to my own advice. I do some good stuff on this podcast. I teach some really useful coaching strategies and there are times when my clients go, “oh yes, since I've listened to your podcast, I've been doing this, this, and this every week, and it's really helping.” And I'm like, I should do this. Because there’s a lot of what I talk about that I implement, but not all of it. It's not easy to always implement. You know, I think sometimes when people look at coaches or people even just ahead of them in academia, they think they've got it all together.

I do the exact same things you guys do. In fact, even this, this podcast I am finishing off now, it's quarter to nine, I'm meant to be in the dog field for nine o'clock, which we book for Marley because he barks at other dogs. And I were meant to finish this by 8:00 AM I messed about on Instagram and I don't even know why I was procrastinating because I'm not stressed about making this.

I think I was just enjoying luxuriating in the fact that today's a day where I'm only working about half the day and started that a little early. So we're all human, we all do this stuff. Where I have made enormous progress is not beating myself up so much. So I'm much better at going, okay, well we can still go and get it recorded, can't we?

And getting it done, rather than saying I've sacked off the day. And through the course of doing this podcast, now I look back, I can absolutely see incremental change in how I support myself and how I look after myself through all of this.

I will be revisiting the podcast we did back in December, I think it was, um, with Professor Jenn Cumming, where we looked at strength based review of the year. We did that for the calendar year because so many people set New Year's resolutions, but I'd really recommend those of you who are coming to the end of an academic year now, that you look back at that episode, pull out the questions that she asks and run through a strength based review of the year yourself.

Being able to see that even when at the time it feels like you're not necessarily making tons of progress, seeing that incremental change is really, really important and really motivating to keep yourself moving forward. So that's lesson six. 

My final lesson is one that I knew, I think, at the beginning of the year, but that has been driven home to me so much this year, and that is the value of knowing that it's not just you.

So much of the pain in academia comes from thinking about the fact that because you find this difficult, it means you don't deserve to be here. Because you sometimes get behind, it means you're not good enough to be on top of your job. Because you sometimes procrastinate, it means you are lazy and unmotivated and those things are just not true. 

The value of having a podcast where somebody is saying to you things that you didn't realize other people thought as well, has just really been made clear to me so many times in messages from you guys. And I see it in my coaching membership program as well. So in the membership where I see students twice a week, every week, it’s commissioned by the University of Birmingham, it's open to other universities, if you want to get in touch. 

Those students, the thing they emphasize more than anything is how much better they feel knowing that it's not just them knowing that other people find it hard, that it's normal to find it hard, and that they can get through it too. One of the students recently commented that not only did it make her feel better, that other people struggled too, she saw those people who had struggled get through their PhDs, and that made her realize that she could get there too. 

That it was okay that she was struggling because everybody who's ever got a PhD had periods where they were struggling, and that's okay. I recently saw on Twitter a tweet by Matthew Cobb, who I think was writing a biography of Francis Crick. Anyway, he's been delving into Francis Crick, the scientist's, um, lab notes and he posted an extract where he talked about crystals that had dried out, um, errors that he'd made, misunderstandings that he'd done, deciding to risk it, and all this sort of stuff. And it just showed we're all in this together. 

And by creating environments, communities where it's okay to share how we feel, whether that's on a podcast or in a workshop or in a membership, we can support each other and empathize with our struggles and share ways to make it less painful, and that is what I'm going to continue to do next year. 

I'm super excited. I have a new program of workshops that I'll tell you all about. I have openings for individual clients. I am recruiting new universities to my membership program. There's going to be so much happening next year. I hope you all have a wonderful summer. I hope you've planned your summers. Go back and look at my two episodes about planning your summers if you haven't, and I hope you've planned for some rest and some fun and some productivity and all of that good stuff. I certainly have, and next time I see you, I will be a married lady. How exciting. Thank you so much for listening all year.

Have a wonderful summer, and I will see you next year.